the words of a fellow pilgrim

When your ethnicity is heaven, then all adversity offers the gift of intimacy, driving you into the home of His heart. {A.V.}

Do you ever know that feeling when you meet a kindred spirit, whether it be through their writing or their presence? Often times, I feel this way about missionaries of old, but in late 2011 I stumbled across a book by Ann Voskamp that significantly impacted me. It helped me to breathe through the storms that hung over my life. And, her writing restored to me the life of REST we have in Christ alone, not a formulaic, rigid, expectations-based, complicated web of religion that I so often make of my life in Christ. It's not just another set of beliefs, an overly-glorified option to make me feel hopeful about my life, something I chose because it "fits" me or because I was "raised Christian." 
No, this...this is Life.
He who pursued me. 
He who set me free. 
He who so loves. 
He who is my All in all, meeting every need of this rugged vessel that is always impossibly unsatisfied until - He overflows, Christ in me.

The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life. {Job 33:4}

It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.{John 6:63}

Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. {2 Corinthians 3:4-6}

All my brokenness is a whisper that I don’t belong, and every time I don’t feel like I belong, the Scarred and Rejected God whispers, “Come here, my beloved.”

And the longer I live, the more I feel like an exile. This is a gift. The exiled make His extravagant love their home.

When heaven is really your motherland, then prayer is really your mother tongue, and you can’t help but yearn to speak in the language of your Father now.
{A.V.}